Christian right keeps its electoral punch

By Chuck Raasch, GNS Political Writer

WASHINGTON - Religious right voters still have a strong impact in elections despite the crumbling of the Christian Coalition as an organization, says a new analysis of voting patterns in the 2000 primaries.

''Overall, it appears that support for the Christian right has increased slightly over the past 20 years, and has not dipped precipitously in the past year,'' said authors Clyde Wilcox, Ted G. Jelen and Rachel Goldberg, in the May-June issue of Public Perspective magazine.

''Whatever happens with the organizations and leaders of this wave of the Christian right, a potential constituency for the movement continues to exist.''

Between 20 and 23% of voters in national elections in the 1990s identified themselves as members of the religious right, and there is evidence that percentage is continuing in 2000.

The authors claim that while the Christian Coalition was far less active in the South Carolina primary this year, the total voters who self-identified with the religious right in exit polls actually was up from the 1996 Republican primary in that state. Slightly more than one-third of all voters in the South Carolina primary this year told exit pollsters they were part of the religious right.

And by a 3-1 margin, these voters favored eventual winner George W. Bush over Sen. John McCain, according to exit polls there.

After McCain attacked the leaders of the religious right just before the Virginia primary, he lost to Bush by 8-to-1 among religious right voters - providing Bush with his margin of victory. About one in five Virginians described themselves as religious conservatives.

In California, also won by Bush, exit polls showed more than one-third of the Republican primary voters said McCain's attack on religious right leaders affected their vote, and Bush won those voters 5-to-1.

The Christian Coalition, political arm of Virginia-based religious broadcaster Pat Robertson's organization, has seen its profile fall dramatically since its former director, Ralph Reed, left after the 1996 election.

Reed has become a GOP consultant who also advises businesses, including Microsoft. He has advised Bush in the 2000 campaign, and helped to mobilize Christian conservatives in some early primaries.

Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition has had financial and legal problems, and has gone through several generations of leadership since Reed left. Earlier this year, some analysts suggested the power of the religious right has waned with the diminished profile of the Christian Coalition, and the gravitation of its former leaders into more secular roles in the public square.

But Reed claimed the impact of religious right voters this year was just as great as in recent Republican primaries because this block of voters helped Bush rebuff McCain's challenge from the left and center.

In an interview, Reed said Christian conservatives have become as much of an endemic voting block as any number of other important sub-demographic groups, from African Americans to women to gays to union voters.

''It is an important reality in American politics,'' Reed said.

Indeed, the Public Perspective analysis claimed that religious conservatives are ''numerically equal to or more numerous than African American voters and labor union members.''

In 1998, for instance, 22% of voters said they had a union member in their household, 18% said they were part of the religious right movement, and 10% said they were African American.

Public Perspective is a journal by the Roper Center Review of Public Opinion and Polling.

Wilcox is professor of government at Georgetown University, Goldberg is a doctoral candidate there, and Jelen is chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.